What is a dream to you?

I was just curious what some of the other members here on TOTJO hold a dream to be.

Do you hold it to be a mechanization through which the mind can engage in its true nature, free of masks and inhibitions?

Or do you instead perhaps hold it to be a means through which the mind can work through its deepest problems, concerns, and desires?

Or do you perhaps believe that dreams are without any meaning or purpose whatsoever?

I personally believe it is a combination of the first two, but I was curious to see what other members believed as well :silly:

I believe when people sleep, their brain tries to rest. to stop make sense out of everything. And the result is dream, a tool to run from this world, to be somewhere else, to be somewhere that it don't have to think and ... to be somewhere it enjoys.

I think we should just enjoy our dreams, and stop trying to get meanings from them... Just enjoy them.

I imagine dreams....
As ch'i being uploaded,
To the universe.

... private myth.

IMHO-
Dreams are the things our mind and heart think about/feel when we are awake. However, we can not fully realize them until we experience them. Dreams give us that opportunity.

Kohadre wrote: Do you hold it to be a mechanization through which the mind can engage in its true nature, free of masks and inhibitions?

Or do you instead perhaps hold it to be a means through which the mind can work through its deepest problems, concerns, and desires?

Or do you perhaps believe that dreams are without any meaning or purpose whatsoever?

Yes.

In order for me to begin asking what a dream is, I first ask myself, what is waking reality?

As far as I have learned through science and philosophy, all experience as we know it is simply the result of activity in our brain interpreting "energy" outside of our inner consciousness. Listening to various physicists and philosophers will lead us to realize that there is no such thing as matter.... no such thing as color.... no such thing light.... or as sound... or touch... or smell.... All of these things are created by the brain in response to stimuli from different patterns of energy... and yet, we cannot even say where any of this energy is actually located. We THINK that it is located "outside of our minds", but this has never been proven and is only a theory. One could just as easily say that none of the energy exists outside of our minds, but is all inside of our consciousness itself. Perhaps there is no "outside" as we know it?

So, then what is a dream? A dream is essentially the exact same happening while we are asleep as we are awake. The brain runs through various electrical impulses, creating the sense of sight, sound, touch, even smell, just as it does while we are awake. The difference I think, seems to be what exactly is stimulating this activity, as the source is on a very different plane than in the waking world.

In Hindu mythology, it is believed that God is playing pretend, and pretends to be not god, but instead, divides himself up in the form of individual consciousness with ego in order to experience [him/her]self. In this way, it is as God is dreaming and the dream is in the form of what we experience during our waking lives. Perhaps, to the god, or a unified consciousness, outside of this "dream" of life is a whole other level of comprehension of experience that we cannot fathom. In the idea that our individual lives are a dream, our lives must have a certain lack of comprehension to the universe that is dreaming us, just as our dreams tend to lack a certain level of comprehension to us. As we dream when we sleep, it may be that "God" is having a dream within a dream... Whenever a new layer of "dream" is manifested in this way, reality is shifted and becomes less stable. However, every manifested layer of dream plays a role in defining the parent layer of dream that creates it. Therefore, our dreams play a role in subjectively defining our experiences of waking reality (or waking dream), while our waking reality as individual people plays a role in defining our parent layer of dream (that possibly being the universal consciousness for example).

This is just the beginning of what I have pondered about the nature of dreams.

When I dream I am me, offstage, in the world outside of the theater.

I don't know.

Dreams are important to me. It is also rare for me to dream as I don't sleep much, and when I do sleep I only sometimes get to the 3rd stage of sleep called RIM sleep, in which dreaming occurs.

anyhow, dreams are a free movie for me